10.3.2026 – our great inventions

our great inventions
corkscrew and toilet paper
of real value to man

From the book, The etiquette of freedom : Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The practice of the wild by Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison (Counterpoint: Berkeley, CA, 2010).

A documentary was made of the two poets, Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison, standing in a field, talking titled The Practice of the Wild and this book, The etiquette of freedom, is the transcript of their conversation plus some extra thoughts and commentary about the thoughts expressed by these poets.

As can be imagined, their conversation was all over the place and full of deep thoughts as poets standing in fields are filled with deep thoughts of the type that deep thinking poets think when standing in a field talking with another deep thinking poet.

Lots of nuggets to dig up here but one that caught my eye this morning was this short exchange.

Gary Snyder : Captain Cook, sailing around the Pacific in order to be the very first person out of Western culture to contact a lot of different island people, said the one thing that they really got interested in was nails. It was a really good trade item.

And Ishi says that the best thing the white man invented was glue, because it makes it so much easier to finish an arrow.

Jim Harrison: Maybe our great inventions are the corkscrew and toilet paper, more so than space stations — of real value to man.

On a rainy Saturday Morning in the Low Country of South Carolina, elevation 5 feet above sea level, I find the statement hard to argue with.

Nails?

Toilet Paper?

Corkscrew?

Things of real value to man.

Maybe our great inventions!

Because its fall and thinking of football, I remember once back when I was a student in Ann Arbor.

I was with friends on what TV would call a gorgeous, sunny, fall afternoon in the State of Michigan, gathered together with 100,000 other people to watch a football game.

Down here in the south, fans still talk about ladies and their ‘game day dress’ but that’s a southern thing and may have to do with what Mark Twain was thinking about when he said sunny fall days are just June days, tuned down.

Fall in Michigan means gray rainy cold days.

Days not fit for a dress but for cold weather clothes

But back then when I was in school, it wasn’t unusual to see fans who still dressed up to go to a game in Ann Arbor..

And understand this was in the day before ‘luxury boxes’ so no matter what, if you wanted to go to a football game in Ann Arbor, you couldn’t sit anywhere else but among the plebians in the stands.

Several rows in front of me and my friends was a party of shall we say, affluent folks.

As an aside, living in a resort town, I have made the acquaintance of some law enforcement officers and am learning some of the code they use to describe the people they have to deal with in this vacation paradise. One code is EMF. It stands for Entitled M … F… (you can fill in the blanks), but I digress.

I won’t say that these folks were EMF’s as they went along with the crowd and made no special demands or anything but they were all dressed, tastefully, more for church than a football game.

They also had brought along a wicker hamper of goodies for later in the game and we did wonder how that got past the security guards so maybe they were EMFs.

As it comes to me, it seems like they had a ticket for the hamper and it sat on the bench in the middle of this group.

The afternoon wore on and as halftime approached it was time to open the hamper.

Not saying the game was boring or anything but the focus of most of us in that section of the stadium was, what did people like this, who came dressed in church clothes to a Michigan football game and bought a ticket for their wicker hamper, would pack for lunch in that wicker hamper.

One feller seemed to be the host of this outing and he took charge of the hamper.

Out came plates and napkins and boxed sandwiches and other finger foods.

The plates were passed out.

The food was offered up.

Then wine glasses came out of the hamper and passed up and down the row.

And lastly, a bottle of wine, which the host of this outing held up for all to see.

This feller then reached back in the hamper and fumbled around.

He turned and hunched over to look down into the hamper and dug and dug and fumbled, a level of frustration building up.

He sat back up and looked at the bottle of wine.

He took a breath and stood up.

He was wearing a blue blazer and light blue shirt and a striped maize and blue tie and pressed khakis.

He stretched out his arms wide in supplication and yelled to the crowd around him, “Does anybody have a corkscrew?”

Maybe our great inventions are the corkscrew and toilet paper, more so than space stations — of real value to man.